Maybe Better Dreams and Plenty
by ninety6tears
Summary: They keep what they can.


In the hotel room they lived all over the bed like college friends, reclaiming in idle indulgences the remnants of their lost years spent apart.

He peered over her shoulder while she flipped through _Time_ magazine. They ordered room service with umbrellas in the glasses of lemonade just to see if the kitchen would do it, then tipped the service like they were lavish movie stars. Ben picked the FM radio station on the alarm clock, then closed his eyes and pointed to pick the color for her nails. Once he timidly pressed his lips to her shoulder while she was spread out on her stomach painting them, and she smiled almost imperceptibly, humming to Fleetwood Mac. Her raised foot bobbed into his like a curious kitten.

Later they really talked, more philosophically than in reminiscence, but sometimes it was both. It was better not to try to push for the latter, they quickly sensed, feeling a shimmer of faint headache when they tried to return to their shared history and not wanting to be troubled with too much of it over their breezy trip. Her feet had been aching a little since they'd left Derry, and he took one of them across his lap to massage it as they sat with one shoulder each at the headboard, as he murmured about the strange, almost unnatural confidence he'd found in architecture. Math had never been the cause of agitation for him that it was for others growing up, but when it came to how it all folded into the angles and structures and physical supports for metal and wood, he felt like the applications and problem solving were more intuitive than a textbook could ever feel.

She interrupted once with a little flinch—"Sorry, that tickles just there."

His light touch moved up, and stopped with a new train of thought at her ankle, forming his thumb and pointer in a circle around it. He asked, "Do you still wear ankle bracelets?"

"Did I ever?" She squinted, recollecting that yes, she might have. She smiled with a new affectionate sparkle, sliding her leg up and down his thigh for some kind of emphasis: "Would you like to get me one? I could wear it at the beach."

But Ben was thinking, drifting. After a minute he said, "I think, when I'd forgotten for so long how many people had ever really chosen me in my life, it was like...building things, that was one thing that chose me. I didn't have to make a choice about what to do for a living...I guess I liked being too busy creating these infinite open spaces for other people's lives to think too much about how empty mine was."

Sobered, she looked at him in simple deep feeling for a moment. "Want you to come here," she whispered.

This was the second night they'd be sharing a bed, but the potential implications of that hadn't happened the night before. There had been a breathlessly lovely kiss shortly before they first hit the road together, after which Ben had finally fallen into a relaxed wonder that mirrored her own rather than looking at her with so much aching reluctance and uncertainty. And then they touched and touched, but it was possible a part of her had been balking just slightly, just a little fearfully, from the way it would feel to give herself to him so entirely. It was a reflex so long learned, to feel those brambles of taboo around anything that could be blissfully good for her, and she'd tried inviting him in with distractingly playful flirts, like she could brush past it by pretending it was nothing monumental. But it was always going to happen like a jump off a cliff with the trust that wings would somehow open with all the deep recesses of strong beating warmth he could open for her.

Their limbs and mouths got tangled for long soft minutes, and then he paused his thorough kisses to look down at her in the lamplight. "...How much do you remember?" he whispered through a tremble of emotion. It was like he could only ask now in this proximity, hushed enough that the air of the city couldn't hear it, as if this _forgetting_ would pass on to the next roof if he asked so secretly.

She looked up, brushing her fingers along his jaw, her eyes meeting his with the same worry. But her sentiments were sturdy. "Feelings, mostly. Not so much images and words, but…"

"Everything we meant to each other. I don't want to…"

Consoling, voice running sweet with promises, she said, "I remember a boy…The first boy who ever touched me in a way that made me feel safe. I remember running from my father and into his arms, and it wasn't just safety but...something I didn't know how to name. He would look at me, and I would forget that I was dirty, that I was lazy, that I could never do anything right. And sometimes I only wanted the power to make him feel that way too."

He whispered something like "Oh," looking like his heart was being squeezed hard, running his thumb along her bare shoulder. His voice cracked. "You have that."

They were back at their threshold with rising emotion, going wordless in the revelations. He held her on his lap with a close cradling of her shoulders holding her into his deeper kisses while his other hand caressed up her thigh and then inside of her to drink her moans, almost touching her to the brink. Once he was steadily thrusting inside of her she groaned at him to never stop, please, she never wanted him to stop making love to her—making him stagger on his own breath and fall against her, bowing into the waves of hair at her shoulder.

Later when the room was dark and they held each other, she asked, "Did Bill tell you what he was going to try to do? For Audra?"

Ben shifted, trying to think deeply, calling back slanted memories of words too vague in the first place. "He was going to try to draw on some last bit of...power, or...You know, I don't think he'd quite thought it all up himself. He seemed to think he'd know once it got to that point." He was relieved to know this much. He was glad she'd asked this, as if they were discovering the significance of it to their own paths.

She felt vulnerable beneath his hands when she said, "I want to try something like that. I want to see if there's one last spark. How much of it all we can keep."

"You mean the memories? But just the good ones?" He sounded uncertain. "Isn't that kind of...having the cake and eating it too?"

With surprising seriousness, she said, "I'm afraid that that's what we're doing now."

"What do you mean?"

"...I don't know," she fibbed.

He kissed her on the nose. "Don't worry."

"I'm going to think about it though."

"I'll be right here if you wanna wake me."

"Dream about me?"

"Sure thing."

Sniggering a little, they nuzzled in a few more kisses, and then he did sleep, and she did think before finally sleeping too.

.

.

.

.

They walked a good while along the docks, too wrapped up in their own promises to make friendly conversation with the tourists and boat owners in Michigan City, finally stopping on a bridge that stretched over where a line of private waterfront property became the main flow of the lake.

Under her arm she carried a stout bottle, and spiraled inside the glass were papers holding snatches and fragments of memory they'd written down back at the hotel lounge which had been barren and gold-tinted at dusk. A poem, the names—they weren't entirely sure they had gotten everyone's full names right but they had seven including their own—a list of places where they used to play. Beyond that they'd mercifully taken the pressure off their frayed minds by holding themselves to whatever they could individually write before the sand timer that belonged to a Boggle game ran out.

The actual purpose of this ritual was unclear, unworded. Whether they thought the fading nature of what they remembered could withstand the flow of the water if not the spell of mutability it held closer to them, or if it was meant to float out as a beacon for all seven of them or just come back to find the two of them some day, to ask about any of that would interrogate and break the belief in something so childlike.

"You throw it," she said when they were alone, peering down into the water reflecting the brilliant sunlight.

"You've got the good arm."

"You don't need a good arm. Just throw it." But she felt reluctant; some real reverence was missing here.

She felt the combination of time speeding up and being sluggish at the same time, a drunk's pitfall before hitting the ground, watching him eyeball the way down with unnecessary calculations. The wind was licking his body into relief against his shirt, the collarbones visible above the buttons. She watched the places on his body that had been a bed for her brow, her hips. She caught the same lump in her throat that had only worsened with their time together at the thought that he lived somewhere and she apparently lived somewhere else, but she had nowhere really solid to return to once it was worded that this vacation from lucidity had to end somewhere. After that there were no guarantees. _Having your cake and eating it too_, _what a moronic phrase, what else do you do with a cake?_—her thoughts were tripping around—But what if it was a cheat that they remained together even now, what if they were _supposed_ to take their peace of mind and not think of each other anymore?

He could leave for home and forget her name. He could leave her just because he decided to. He could crush her with nothing more than softness and sweetness followed by the truth. But the bright weight of that fact was that she'd allowed him that power at last.

He was, almost with a too cavalier shrug, rearing back his arm for the throw, and she yelped, "No wait—"

He waited, halting and turning into her as she went into his arms. "What?"

"...I just love you so much," she said into his neck, into his ear, "I want you so much. I want you always."

It was soon, it was fast, it was—magic, maybe, enough, and desired aside from all that. His hold tightened around her as if in relief from the same uncertainty. "I want to give you everything," he whispered fervently back to her. "Everything. I love you."

She slipped away, reaching for the bottle. She had tears in her eyes, she realized, and a ringing warmth like a prayer when she turned and quickly cast the bottle out into the great lake.

Instead of watching the glass shine and glint across the water they embraced again, kissing perhaps too passionately for a place where anyone could walk by, too swept up in creating a middle to some beginning. When their breath slowed to the sighs following the mood's exertion, they simply hugged and rocked each other, holding on as if the day's warmth came not from the sun but their own glowing marrow.

.

.

.

.

Strolling along next to the shops later, they stopped to look into the window of the jeweler's.

Arm grasped loosely around her waist, he smiled down at her, asked, "How about that ankle bracelet?"

She thought of eternity laughing through the dizzy cartwheels of children, speeding through the metallic gleam of a bicycle's circling wheels, running in rings around more delicate things. Enough? Enough to remember enough to keep each other, if that would be—had to be—enough. She said, "I was thinking something smaller."


End file.
